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Sunday, July 1, 2012

Libya protesters storm Benghazi voting office

Hundreds of armed protesters have stormed the election commission in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi, witnesses have said.
An Al Jazeera team in Tripoli confirmed on Sunday that an estimated
1,000 people occupied the election commission building to protest the
allocation of seats for the western district of which Benghazi is the
capital.
By late Sunday, the situation was back under control, a member of the
public outreach team of the High National Election Committee (HNEC)
told Al Jazeera.
Earlier in the evening, a large group of armed young men stormed the
HNEC building, chanting pro-federalist slogans, as police attempted to
disperse the crowd.
The protesters smashed windows and burned the United Nations office also located in the building.
Men carried computers and ballot boxes from the building and began to crush them while chanting pro-federalist slogans.
Some election materials were burned outside the office complex,
witnesses said, but the main storage of the voting material remained
uncathed.
Al Jazeera correspondent David Poort, reporting from Benghazi, said
there had been several protest across Benghazi on Sunday against the
allocation of seats for the eastern province of Cyrenaica, of which
Benghazi is the capital, in the soon-to-be installed General National
Council.
The National Transitional Council (NTC) has allotted representation
in parliament according to demographics, allocating 100 seats for
Tripolitania in the west, 60 for Cyrenaica and 40 for Fezzan in the
south.
This allegedly unequal distribution has angered many Cyrenaicians,
and some candidates in the upcoming July 7 elections have openly voiced
their preference for an autonomous region.
"Different protests were held around the city on Sunday and these
protests were supposed to come together at the electoral commission, “
Poort said, adding: “The commission received all the necessary election
material: printed ballot papers, plastic ballot boxes, ink and voting
booths, from Dubai several days ago.”
"They were being kept in a warehouse before being distributed to different polling stations across Cyrenaica.”
The vote will be the first free election since an uprising last year in which Muammar Gaddafi was ousted from office.
Benghazi, where the uprising began in February 2011, has demanded autonomy from the central government in Tripoli.
The move has been resisted by the National Transitional Council, which has governed Libya since Gaddafi was overthrown.